from LaFarr Stuart

Subject: ICM 816 From: LaFarr Stuart To: rickb@pail.enginet.com Hi: I saw your page and photos of the ICM 816 electronic calculator. I know a little about them, and actually have two which I bought about 1972. I believe both are working. One I used and the other I gave to my parents. The Woodland Hills company was actually a subsidiary of Electric Arrays in Mountain View, CA. Electric Arrays made the 6 chip set and the chip set was advertised quite heavily in Electronic News. That would be about 1970 - 1972. Initially the 816 was to sell for around $450, but when Electric Arrays got into financial troubles they dumped inventory for cash and they were sold at a San Jose outlet for around $135 each. That is where and when I bought the two that I have. I moved onto smaller pocket calculators the ICM 816 eventually lost its desk space. But for quite a while I would use it to get the precise integer result up to 16 digits which was better than most calculators will do today. ? As I recall on division you actually got both a quotient and a remainder? I hope this might give you a clue as to where to look for specs on the IC's in the ICM 816. I think it deserves a proper place in the history of Calculators because as far as I know it was the first to ever sell for under $200. If this is true it would be the first "personal home calculator". Just so you can figure out what a ICM 816 calculator is here is the URL I was responding to. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7510/icm816.html

from Randy Neff

I found an incredible website on HP calculators, starting with the desktop 9100. http://www.hpmuseum.org Includes descriptions, pictures inside and out, describes the technlogy. Also articles from the HP Journal on the caculators, including the one that I co-wrote: http://www.hpmuseum.org/journals/wooda.htm The site also publishes a 5 CD set of manual scans for the various calculators, including some repair manuals. Anyway, Check It Out! Randy.

Memories of Monroe
from W. R Collins after hearing that I was the successful bidder on an old 10 columns of keys Monroe calculator

Let's not knock the old Monroe calculator! It hurts my feelings! Back when the dinosaurs were still running around and I was a Pfc in the U.S. Army I was assigned for duty in the Adjutant General's Office in a Personnel Research unit for the U.S. Army. It seems that a good portion of my time on military duty was with one of those Monroe calculators in front of me and me working the keys. It was a neat machine. It was the only thing available at that time that enabled one to run correlation coefficients easily [actually with a lot of work but far easier than any other way] as one could get the Sum of X and the Sum of Y and of X Squared and of Y Squared and 2 times the Sum of XY in one run through the data. It was then an easy adjustment to work out the correlation coefficient. A significant portion of my military duty was so spent. Remember at this time the only computers available were those early IBM 700 series machines ... so speak nicely of the old Monroe machine. Later on when I did my Master's Thesis research I used one again. ... Bill C.